Hiring at top four IT firms touches eight-year high

Even as Indian’s technology sector sheds employees lacking required skills, companies are busy recruiting those with the right skill sets. This is reflected in the hiring trend of the top Indian information technology (IT) companies.

After a dip in the previous fiscal, net hiring at the top four IT companies hit an eight-year high of 78,500. The sample includes Tata Consulting Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, and HCL Technologies – ranked based on the size of their respective headcount.

The last time the sample’s headcount addition exceeded the latest tally was in FY12 when the companies had recruited 81,722 employees on net basis. Hiring remained below 70,000 in each of the years from FY13 to FY18.

Hiring trend is often considered as a leading indicator of demand reflecting confidence of companies in future demand scenario.

The aggregate employee base of the four companies was 9.6 lakh at the end of March 2019, 8.9% higher than the year ago.

TCS accounted for 44% of the sample’s aggregate number of employees followed by Infosys at 23.7%.

While HCL Tech’s share in the sample’s employee base at 14.3% was lower than Wipro’s share of 17.8%, its revenue share exceeded that of the latter for the first time in FY19. With $8,632 million in annual revenue, HCL Technologies contributed 17.4% to the sample’s revenue.

Wipro with $8,189 million of revenue on FY19, accounted for 16.5% of the sample revenue of over $ 49,534 million.